Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Well I finally got motivated again to work on my latest family video. This one covers the graduation of my nephews and nieces from college and high school. I shot the principal video at their graduation party in June. I had worked out an approximate storyboard in my mind that would begin the video with the minute thirty bit of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. I would use this as bed for "Ken Burn's Effect" panned still images of the actual graduations. I had a lot of fun making cuts based on musical beats. I think people will be impressed. I then fade to black and do an abrupt change to the actual party. Overall, I've got about 9 minutes so far. I want to go back to the video to see if there are any more choice bits I can include. Once, the editing is done I can render to DVD Mpeg 2. Then all I have to do is prepare a new DVD menu graphic and write the new DVD with the previous "films" I've made. The whole thing gets that big debut on Thanksgiving. It's become a bit of a tradition to debut a new video every Thanksgiving.

I am thinking of sending copies of the completed DVD to other family members around the country as a Christmas gift. It might be fun.

I've been using Sonic Foundry's Vegas 4 for my video editing. This is another fantastic piece of software and is performing very rock solidly for me. For a quick check, I rendered straight to a VCD to look at on my TV. I wasn't expecting much quality wise but I was very impressed that things looked so good with this format. The DVD should be even better.